When all you can do is pick up the needles

I've been knitting up a storm recently, but it hasn't been a particularly happy experience. A dear friend is dealing with her father's just-diagnosed late-stage metastatic cancer. We've been lucky enough to get to know her dad, Himself even more so then me, and the news about his cancer has been very difficult.

I don't set much store in prayer, but my immediate reaction to the news was “I must knit him something”. After consultation with the daughter, I decided to knit him a nice, warm jumper to ward off the post-chemo chills.

I did a bottom-up, saddle sleeve sweater all in one piece, á la Elizabeth Zimmerman – a technique I've wanted to try for a while. I did a simple 2x2 cable up each side and along the outside of the sleeve up to the collar. The yarn is Colorado Yarns Durango, a wool/acrylic/viscose blend I've had in stash for a looong time. The finished sweater is cozy and warm, easy to care for, and hopefully will help keep him comfortable and warm in the coming months.

After finishing that off, I knew I wanted to knit something for Mum as well.

This is Cinnamon Grace, and since that picture was taken, I've knit the border and started the cast off. Once I've got it blocked, I'll take some better pictures and give some details.

They have a hard road ahead, and I knit every stitch of these pieces with good thoughts and hope for them in what is statistically a pretty hopeless situation. I hope they'll wear these and feel us close to them, sending mojo and strength across the miles.

Productivity in miniature

Catherine and I seem to be sharing a brain today: we're both blogging about finished mini-socks. Here are mine:


And here's what they looked like in skein/ball form:


Pattern: Kate Atherley's Training sock, but done in fingering weight yarn instead of worsted weight.
Yarn: Sweet Georgia Yarns Tough Sock, 80% superwash merino/20% nylon, 425 yds/115 gr (4 oz)
Needles: US 2/2.75 mm
Start/finish: I had 16 mini skeins to knit from, and each sock took me about 45 min once I'd memorized the pattern. According to my Ravelry project page, I started on the 23 March and finished on the 28th of March.

Comments: Kate's pattern is great, easy to follow, easy to memorize, just plain easy (and that's all good when you're in production mode!). The yarn is fabulous - no splitting of the plies at all, and the colors are glorious. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

From left to right: Berry Tart, Boheme, Stillwater and Rusted

Cold Mountain, Midnight Garden, Stella and Violet Hill

Honey Fig, Summer Dusk, Maple and Hummingbird

Snapdragon, Peashoot, Coal Harbour and Lakeshore Drive.

I am finding it absolutely impossible to pick a favorite. I love them all. I want enough SGY Tough Sock to fill a bath tub so I can submerge myself in a rainbow of vibrant color. Sadly, I have to give these back to the yarn provider.

More happily, I have to start on the next batch...

Spun up colourways: FRET CFP-YFP

Whenever I dye up a new colorway, I always want to spin up a sample of it, just to see how it looks and give customers some idea of what their final yarn might look like. Sadly, I'm not very good about sitting down and doing the sampling, so it doesn't always work out that way.

When I spin at home, I usually open up a bag and start right in with no sampling whatsoever. Sometimes I've got a project in mind for the final yarn, sometimes not. But I don't usually sample unless I'm trying to reproduce a particular commercial yarn (I've blogged about my sampling experience previously) for a project. 

One of the best things about Wool House was the opportunity to try out some of the new colorways and do some sampling. I was there for a couple of hours each time, so a perfect amount of time to play around with spinning styles and plying styles and whatnot. I managed to sample three different colorways - today's example is some glorious, truly brightly colored Romney.

FRET CFP-YFP on Romney

I started with some of this gorgeous stuff. When I dye up a lot of fiber, I do more then needed for a particular number of bags (i.e. 17+ ounces to end up with four 4 oz bags). When the fiber gets split up for packaging, I pull off the slightly matted ends and however much more I need to pull off to get 4 oz bundles. Those leftover bits are then free for me to play with however I like. This time around, I sampled.

The three sample skeins: a 2-ply, a chain ply, and a true 3-ply (i.e. not chain plied).

First up is the 2 ply (left picture). I had three chunks of fibre that were more or less the same size, with more or less the same colour distribution, so I took the first one and split it lengthwise three times, generating four pieces of top that were roughly the same length. I spun two pieces on one bobbin, two pieces on another bobbin and plied them together. I ended up with a bit more yardage on one bobbin, so I wound it off around my hand and Andean plied the rest of the singles, which is my typical solution to uneven single amounts. 

I'd spun up a bit of this Romney before, and enjoyed it, but I was really impressed by how soft and silky it spun up in the final yarn. Romney is a long wool, and can be a bit on the coarser side, but this top is truly luscious. The final 2 ply is soft, with a really lovely drape and not a lot of elasticity (as you would expect from the breed).

The next sample I spun was the chain ply (middle picture). I split the fibre the same way and spun them all end to end. Then I plied from that. I've found that, while I need to stop and start when chain plying on my Lendrum, I can just set the speed on the miniSpinner down a bit lower and do the chaining without having to stop entirely. This goes back to my initial observation that I wasn't getting enough twist insertion with the miniSpinner. In this case, not a bad thing!

The chain plying plays up on the colour blending in this colourway - there are distinct solid turquoise and yellow sections, but a lovely green mix at the interfaces that is just what I was hoping for with this colorway. Result!

Last, but not least, the true 3 ply (right picture). For this I split the fiber a bit differently so I could get a fractal three ply. I pulled the length of top I had into 3 pieces of equal length. The first I split into half lengthwise, the second into quarters lengthwise, and the last I left intact. The end result is a yarn that has one ply running from blue to yellow to blue, one ply that goes blue/yellow/blue/blue/yellow/blue, and one that goes blue/yellow/blue/blue/yellow/blue/blue/yellow/blue/blue/yellow/blue. So some stretches are all one color, some are 2 plies color A/1 ply color B, and some sections are 1 ply color A/2 plies color B. I find this a really good technique for blending the colors in a handdyed top to reduce the amount of striping that shows up in the finished piece (particularly for sweaters or other larger projects). 

Of course the real test of all this sampling is knitting the swatches. I have good intentions to do so, but I suspect I might need another Wool House to actually sit down and get them done!

The sock moratorium seems to be over

Remember how I said I was in a sock rut? Actually, it wasn't really a rut so much as a complete absence of any desire to knit socks whatsoever. A sock drought, if you will. Well...I'm happy to say that the drought seems to be over.

I have discovered that there are two solutions to lack of sock mojo: the first is to knit socks with handspun (I've got another batch of handspun yarn ready for the next pair already).

The second solution? Knit a glorious rainbow of mini-socks for samples.

There are sixteen mini-skeins there, and I've done 6 little, itty-bitty socks in the last two days. I. Cannot. Stop. With. Mini. Socks. I am totally enfatuated, so enfatuated that I'm having trouble doing anything else. Which is great for my sense of productivity and accomplishment (1 sock = about 45 min. Result!), but not so good for getting anything finished off that someone bigger then my dog might wear (i.e. the handspun socks are at the exact state seen in the above photo and have been for five days now).

The upside is that I should be done with the minis in a few more days and I will be required to get myself back to human-sized knitting projects. Like the sweater in progress, and the socks, and the hats, and the mittens, plus the deadline knitting that needs to be done...see you in a month or so!

Chain plied Turkey Day

In the week leading up to Wool House, I was working on finishing up some Turkey Day Cheviot, with the idea of knitting up some matching socks. I used to knit a lot of socks, but have been feeling rather uninspired of late, so I decided that starting up socks out of handspun might be a good solution.

Turkey Day on Cheviot

I had a 4 oz bundle of fibre, so I split it down the middle lengthwise as evenly as I could without a scale, and spun a fine single on the miniSpinner. Once the singles were done, I chain plied (also called Navajo plying) and ended up with two more-or-less matching skeins.

I really like chain plying to preserve colour runs, although many people don't recommend chain plied yarns for socks. Because of the yarn structure (basically a long series of loops, kind of like crochet), there's an assumption that it won't wear as well as a true 3-ply. I have not done the experiment to actually test that assumption (knit two socks, one chain plied and one 3-plied and compare how well they stand up to being worn and washed), but Cheviot is a pretty sturdy wool, so I'm hopeful they'll wear well.

I haven't measured the yardage yet on these. The two skeins seem to be (to my eye) pretty close grist-wise, so I'm optimistic that I'll end up with a pretty good match. Worst case scenario, I'll end up with a pair of socks that start off matching in the feet and run astray somewhere on the leg - I can live with that!

I'm really looking forward to seeing how those blue and grey bits knit up against the warmer colours. And I'm also really looking forward to not having to think about knitting wool socks because my feet are so cold - I'm ready for winter to be over already!